There have been people overselling the idea that AGI is tomorrow morning, which commercially could make sense. But if you look at the various benchmarks, GPT-5 is just where you would expect the models at that point in time to be. By the way, it’s not just GPT-5, it’s Claude and Google models, too. In some areas where AI systems weren’t very good, like Humanity’s Last Exam or FrontierMath, they’re getting much better scores now than they were at the beginning of the year.
At the same time, the overall landscape for AI governance and safety is not good. There’s a strong force pushing against regulation. It’s like climate change. We can put our head in the sand and hope it’s going to be fine, but it doesn’t really deal with the issue.
The biggest disconnect with policymakers is a misunderstanding of the scale of change that is likely to happen if the trend of AI progress continues. A lot of people in business and governments simply think of AI as just another technology that’s going to be economically very powerful. They don’t understand how much it might change the world if trends continue, and we approach human-level AI.
Like many people, I had been blinding myself to the potential risks to some extent. I should have seen it coming much earlier. But it’s human. You’re excited about your work and you want to see the good side of it. That makes us a little bit biased in not really paying attention to the bad things that could happen.
Even a small chance—like 1% or 0.1%—of creating an accident where billions of people die is not acceptable.
The AI veteran who believes AI is progressing—but not fast enough to prevent the bubble from bursting
Stuart Russell, distinguished professor of computer science, University of California, Berkeley, and author of Human Compatible
I hope the idea that talking about existential risk makes you a “doomer” or is “science fiction” comes to be seen as fringe, given that most leading AI researchers and most leading AI CEOs take it seriously.
There have been claims that AI could never pass a Turing test, or you could never have a system that uses natural language fluently, or one that could parallel-park a car. All these claims just end up getting disproved by progress.
People are spending trillions of dollars to make superhuman AI happen. I think they need some new ideas, but there’s a significant chance they will come up with them, because many significant new ideas have happened in the last few years.